Land
3:30 PM December 27, 2022 At the Shore by My Studio Photo by Aviva Rahmani
The Choice
Art has historically been cultural glue for communities under stress. As an ecoartist, I have struggled with the realities of environment danger, seeking where I might position myself with integrity. I decided to risk my entire life's work in the most dramatic act of ecoartivism I could imagine.
In April 2022, I left New York City to live fulltime on the vulnerable eastern coast of Vinalhaven Island, Maine. None of the disasters caused by climate change have changed anything about the assumptions and behaviors of the privileged few. The reality of climate change, species loss and sea level rise not only inform my practice but in committing my life's work to danger, I am publicly welcoming the internalized and embodied possible prospect of annihilation, making my studio life an avatar of what we risk.
On the 2022 Winter Solstice, I moved the last of my artwork, which had been in storage in New York for four years, to my studio here. On one hand, it was cause for celebration, the first time in my life that all my work was in the same place and ready for inventory work. On the other hand, this commitment of mine to the historic precarity of my studio feels like an artist’s version of threatening to burn myself alive to protest the unthinkable.
Until now, for thirty years, my work has been dispersed. One physical body of work was in New York City, either in my mother's home or, later, in my own coop, which I sold in 2018, and the physical work I had produced in Maine was in my studio here. There is still some work inadvertently left in storage which I hope to retrieve but most of my work was returned and can now be considered. The Smithsonian is already at work on my archives, of but an inventory would allow me to seriously consider what world I've been representing and share it with others. That consideration of representation is in the context of watching over this land, which is now vulnerable to sea level rise. An inventory will be a mirror to contemplate specific relationships I've observed between art object, land and cultural impact. On the other hand, the studio where all this work is contained now, is 3' from deep ocean water.
This is a statement about why and how fossil fuels are consuming habitat and destroying culture. This essay explains why and how I made my decision, where I've positioned myself and what I mean by this statement.
The Loss
The planet is losing land to climate change from sea level rise in some regions and drought in others. These disasters strip the planet of the productive habitat which supports human civilization. In 2017, for a photomontage in an installation at the KRICT Gallery, South Korea, I identified where land mass would remain after maximum sea level rise caused by polar melt. Not much was left to sustain life and much of what remained might not be productive or contain adequate fresh water, certainly not enough for all the planet's current biodiversity.
An appetite and competition for land domination has insured ecosystem failure. and ultimately, even more land loss. In turn, the consequences of those failures provide fertile new opportunities for economic instability, military campaigns are initiated, fascism and ecocide proliferate, and ever more land is swallowed by sea level rise, swallowing land and culture whole.
These threats are particularly acute for vulnerable coastal Indigenous and poor communities, whom feel tied to incrementally vanishing land by culture, financial limitations or both. The disappearance of habitable land generates cascades of additional problems. International waves of disruptive immigrations and habitat fragmentation complicates demographic relationships between urban and rural life. That disruption impacts many metropolitan areas vulnerable to sea level rise, such as New York City. The most dramatic example of that disruption in the United States was the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans in 2007.
Managed Retreat
The clumsy governmental solution is "managed retreat" a default answer to previously failed policies such as subsidizing the same fossil fuel corporations which have perpetrated these disasters.
Spring 1994, I first saw waves break halfway under my studio floor during a spring storm surge. At other times, I have seen waves lap 360 degrees around the building, making it a precarious island in the ocean 15 miles out to sea from the mainland. Luckily the building is on concrete piers, so on those occasions, the wooden floor remained untouched. Going forward however, as sea levels continue to rise and climate change causes more dramatic hurricanes, the piers may not be high enough for the flood waters during another spring tidal surge. I am making a deliberate choice but many have no choice, they can't afford "managed retreat." I am like many people in the world, unlike those few enjoying an apex of prosperity, I have limited resources. I can't afford to raise the piers, but I still choose to stay.
I have made statements about land management, intercontinental fragmentation and contiguity in my book, "Divining Chaos" and other writings documenting projects going back decades. Internationally, I have spoken in talks about these topics and made art about them, as in Ghost Nets and The Blued Trees Symphony. However, my ambitions don't take me flying across seas much anymore., partly to eschew fossil fuel use. Instead, I have come back to this relatively small piece of land on this relatively small island in the Gulf of Maine where I am drawn to make a collection of dawn views, compelled to inventory my life’s work and continue working to produce new work and stubbornly imagine deeper connections to my ecoart practice. and a larger world in transition even as it all faces imminent annihilation.
Land and culture are the drowned casualties of both untimely measures and managed retreat. Once lost, every aspect of human life is further strained, metastasizing between regions, ultimately condemning all life on Earth to be collateral damage. International governmental failures have been interdependent with corporate power, from the Kremlin to China. The lost land is the battleground where ecocidal, anthropocentric hubris conquered tenacious ecosystems that clung to the shore.
As land managers discuss "managed retreat." I have deliberately returned to vulnerable land and will be staying as long as I can. It is one thing to paint pictures in a safe studio about the horrors of climate change. It is entirely another to choose to work in a building which might imminently be inundated and washed out to sea along with a long life's work.
My decision to resist managed retreat isn't a Joan of Arc martyr complex. I don't fear actual death in a storm. After all, if floodwaters rise, theoretically I can always abandon my body of art and escape up the hill to my home. Nor is this commitment all about hardship. Besides my mystical connection to the site of my studio and my defiance of reality, there is the light. The light defies any standard of beauty. Light attaches to land.
Light
Throughout my entire career, light has been my formal constant. The only other time I'd seen light like what we have here was when I reached Scotland, on the shores of Loch Lomand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loch_Lomond, it was a light I've never seen matched anyplace else in the world I've traveled except when I first got off the boat here in 1989 and found the light on this island. In fact, the geology of the late Mesozoic era DID connect the fragment that is now Vinalhaven Island to Scotland and the greater European continent 66 million years ago. I bought the town dump on the Eastern side of the island, facing the great northern Atlantic Ocean and I restored a former sawmill at the tip of the site to be my studio.
Every morning I capture and post the dawn from my home here on social media with a few words about hope and light. Light is the one element that no amount of ecocide can eliminate. It is an eternal manifestation of life on Earth. My captures of light are the analog of my commitment to this land, a diary of faithful commitment and another kind of attention to small events. I call them the "Dawn Chronicles," even though they include several sunsets and even midday captures. Each capture reflects my gut connection to this land and the light that bathes it; the irrationality of and persistence of hope despite evidence of a less sanguine reality. The Dawn Chronicles are another manifestation of my irrational connection here.
My audience for the Dawn Chronicles captures is very modest, rarely seeing over 50 likes on Facebook. They are another small ritual. I am in a love affair with a place, something Lucy Lippard wrote about in "The Lure of The Local". The cover of her book incidentally features a house surrounded by the flood waters of a storm
On December 23, 2022, we experienced just such a threatening storm. High tide would be at 9:54 PM and was projected to produce flooding. 9:54 PM was too late and dark for me to come down the hill where my house is to my studio at the shore to see how far the water could be. I had to surrender to providence. It was symbolic of a greater surrender to a world that refuses to "look up" as the movie warned. Or as my publisher, Lynne Elizabeth of New Village Press https://www.newvillagepress.org/put it, " Nonfiction is not selling well the last couple years, environmental topics in particular. A large percentage of the public is in denial and not reading except to escape."
We live in a world facing catastrophes that art dealers and book publishers have noticed most people want to escape from.
The Task
I have aspired to affect mainstream attitudes to climate change. The greater task I foresaw was to change the hearts and minds of the small number of fossil fuel executives and the government officials beholden to them; to assert that global good is more important than the short-term greed of a handful of oligarchs. Eventually, with my project The Blued Trees Symphony, I settled on ecocide as the trigger point of cultural leverage. The legal theory I developed hinges on definitions of ownership between copyright and eminent domain law.
The task is, of course, somewhat complicated by how many people need the resources that advanced energy can deliver. But had adequate investment gone into renewable energy we might not be at our present impasse, which leaves the entire population of the world and all its species as collateral damage in an environmental war between haves and have nots. Despite decades of hard work and sacrifice to seat my work in an international conversation, I feel as helpless as the poorest person in Bangladesh, Pakistan or New Orleans to protect myself or anyone else. I feel driven to more extreme measures. Moving my work to my studio here commits me to embody the vulnerability of the world I care about in my life here. The vulnerability of my life here is a living metaphor for climate change. representing the limits of what any individual can accomplish without powerful intervention.
In 1980 I traveled to Europe. My task then was to study the trajectory of renaissance art history from south to north and the changing light from Rome, Italy to Loch Lomond, Scotland, as part of my recovery from a disastrous head injury. In 1979, I had fractured my skull in a riding accident and been in a coma for two weeks. When I woke, I knew I had to boldly consolidate my thinking as an artist. In Scotland, I found a purplegreen light that took my breathe away.
The context for my decision was another choice, made decades ago. Starting in 1990, I committed myself to very deliberately study chosen places and events which I identified as "trigger points" in potential biogeographic and cultural change. In 1990, I made my first commitment to this land, (Ghost Nets (1990-2000). That commitment was to restore it from its former life as the town dump, to its present existence as flourishing wetlands and a healthy uplands riparian zone replete with indigenous vegetation and alive with birds. The centerpiece of that work was the restoration of a 1/3 acre pocket marsh, a scale typical of the entire upper half of the Gulf of Maine that I hoped with support fisheries health. That was the beginning of my trigger point theory, the conviction that restoring a small site that deconstructed habitat fragmentation could have regional impacts. In Ghost Nets, when I was most seriously ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, I experienced the land restoration as an avatar of my own recovery from illness and personal trauma. My trigger point now is in my studio on a small promontory of coastal land on Vinalhaven Island, Maine where I first conceived of trigger points as an aspect of ecological restoration.
I watch other small critical events from my outpost: the rise of fascism, made interdependent with the pressures of climate change by the cascades that happen when root causes of change are ignored, including the wealth and safety gaps of our present. In this article by Henry A. Giroux, originally published in Salon, the case is made to pay attention to the rise of fascism as a string consequential trigger point events. Giroux's analysis connects dots between small events in contained situations and trajectories that lead to full blown fascism. The grave danger of fascism is not only genocide, as if that weren't enough to chill our view of the future. It is the shell game of look here not there: see the prosperity, ignore how your life and those you love is being crushed, meanwhile, let us extract so much from the environment that nothing is left alive and studios wash out to Portugal.
In my book, I described trigger point theory as an approach to ecological restoration. Fundamental to my trigger point theory is just this visceral connection to one small location at a time that I experience here, in the context of a wider world. The wider world I see from this site is vast. It includes pressures on lobsterpeople as government struggles to balance economics and evidence of a dwindling and iconic species. But the lobsters are also struggling to escape threats from climate change, migrating north to escape warming waters.
In, "Divining Chaos," I described trigger point theory as an approach to ecological restoration. Fundamental to my trigger point theory is just this visceral connection to one small location at a time that I experience here, in the context of a wider world. The wider world I see from this site is vast. It includes pressures on lobsterpeople as government struggles to balance economics and evidence of a dwindling and iconic species. But the lobsters are also struggling to escape threats from climate change, migrating north to escape warming waters.
Generally, we are all inching towards the impact I still hope we might avert. Independent artists, by definition, have greater freedom to think expansively and arguably, function as greater visionaries, beholden to not much outside themselves unless you count the market for their work. It seems to me that visionary leap of faith is what’s required and exactly what institutional gatekeepers tend to exclude. So, am I accomplishing anything by deliberately risking what I care about and have spent my life assembling to make a statement about a common threat? I am not passive. I will continue to work in my studio.
I have begun the systematic work of inventorying my artwork. Inventory work is the meticulous task of chronologically numbering each item of art and recording its data and provenance. It is a ritualistic process. I have a commitment to my own work as much as I'm committed to this land, this place or representing its risk.
Indigenous Inspiration
Much of the inspiration for my commitment comes from studying Native American attitudes to land. It means affirming my connection to what Indigenous people call Guardianship of this land and to frame my work in the values I learned from them. Even though I'm not Indigenous their ethos of guarding and valuing the land, learning to cooperate with the land for reciprocal health has inspired the foundations of my work.
When I first started seriously studying Native American approaches to land and life, I was given an example from a colleague who learned from the Plains tribes of waiting outside a community until an invitation was extended, sometimes for a long time. When I recently engaged in one of the Rising Voices events, eager to understand more about their attitudes, I asked the Elders how to be properly respectful when asking a question. An Elder told me in response, about the state of mind and approach with which someone might “ask something” respectfully of her own Native peoples. My takeaway was the emphasis on the proper preparation, not the outcome.
In our dominant culture we think a lot about any ask, but the general idea, is to be clear and persuasive about what you want as an act of acquisition not transference. In this Elder’s counsel, it was about the humility and acceptance of being the petitioner. In other encounters with Rising Voices, I was admonished when I asked questions at all. For some Native peoples, the proper way to learn something is to listen to what is transferred at the proper time and manner- to Elders, dreams, and rituals, not on demand.
Indigenous peoples have a lot of relevant and powerful questions for the rest of us about how we conduct ourselves. That is quite different than the models they live by in their own communities or how they acquire and preserve knowledge, which is more about guidance than challenge. I think when Native Americans, ask a question, it goes to how they are trying to negotiate interactions with non-Native people. It seems to be a survival strategy, for example, over treaty rights. I think the conflict over how and why to ask a question is one reason it has been so difficult for many Indigenous peoples to negotiate academic and governmental situations their survival depends upon.
Arguably, asking questions is at the heart of Jewish culture. I'm Jewish. A remote Maine island probably isn't the ideal location for members of my tribe. Except for Israel, you don't hear many Jewish people talk about land connections and I'm not sure how many Israelis think of their connection to their country as a guardianship mandate. But here I am, and I make these documents of the morning almost every day, even tho the rest of my day might be about tedious administrative tasks and number crunching and each day, my irrational commitment is restored by light and then I work my heart out in my studio, which may vanish in a moment.
In terms of historical attribution, I think one could make a good case for why the Age of Enlightenment, which encouraged scientific inquiry came after the Inquisition (the ultimate question?). As someone who came from a Jewish cultural (not religious) background, I was taught in the traditional Seder rituals from earliest childhood, to recognize what is a good question and then to listen to a good answer. As a child, I got a lot of approval from my father, arguably the most approval, as I matured, for asking good questions. But not all questions are benign. We all know the pattern of “gotcha” questions intended more to discredit someone else’s experience and compete than to learn anything. It happened that the Winter solstice of 2022 coincided with Hanukah and proceeded, Christmas. These sacred times are when we accept the mysteries of miracles and the astonishment of hope, without questions.
A striking aspect to me of TEK is the absence of “great” questions, whether about religion or observation. Rather, knowledge is transmitted intergenerationally in the course of daily and community life. That is a very different paradigm than the one I know best. But the TEK people I know are interested in both modalities. So how can I as an ecoartist be a proactive student of either attitude as I advance my research about land?
This place of reciprocity and transference is where I’ve been stuck for a while, which people like Robin Kimmerer in "Braiding Sweetgrass" and members of the Rising Voices community have been voicing about traditional environmental Knowledge (TEK).
My quixotic decision to bring my work to my studio here was tied to reflections on one day, December 14, 2022, Indigenous Knowledge Day. That day began with a Gulf to Gulf. Zoom with Deanna Pindell https://www.deannapindell.net/ who works with WEAD and Svetlana Sequeira Costas of Arts Cabinet https://www.artscabinet.org/, now working with Aboriginal groups, then reading a fabulous new chapter by the art historian Rebecca Zorach, who writes on art and law. Her most recent text includes an analysis of the legal intersectionality between Indigenous and Western artists and activists It included an exegesis of my own work pitting a legal theory against fossil fuel infrastructure proliferations. Zorach's premises pivot on the experience of ownership and environmental rights and include the more than human. My day ended with an author's Zoom on the new book edited by Michelle Montgomery on TEK, “Re-Indigenizing Ecological Consciousness And The Interconnectedness To Indigenous Identities". More and more, I think exactly the intersectionality Zorach highlighted and the attitudes represented in Montgomery's anthology are what could still save the world.
I have committed myself to a dream ritual here, to continue working steadily in my studio, come what may with sea level rise and climate change. I imagine questions of the sea, the Earth, the air, the light. I wait for answers while embracing my precarity and vulnerability. Even as I accept my gamble, I dream of a nature restored and will observe whether my dreams or my nightmares manifest.